This monumentally large painting brings together many of the raw and visceral themes that characterize Philip Guston's return to figurative subject matter in the late 1960s. Prior to that he had been for many years one of the most lyrical abstractionists of Abstract Expressionism, a group that also included Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. The painting's poignant narrative of confrontation, struggle, and uncertainty is as ambiguous as it is compelling, with precedents in the social commentaries Guston painted during the 1930s and 1940s.

"The Street" is a serious investigation into states of disorder and confusion presented in the vernacular language of cartoon figures and naïve drawing. The composition is divided into three vertical sections, each depicting a different state of being: passive decay, violent aggression, and total disarray. At the right, a large trashcan is stuffed to overflowing with empty bottles, old strips of wood, a shoe, and other refuse. In the center is a barrage of disembodied limbs, hairy and paw-like, wielding trashcan lids as shields. These arms confront to the left a wave of skinny, interlocked legs whose movements seem thwarted by their own oversize shoes. Below, on the horizon line, which is the street itself, a pair of large spiders ominously sits poised for action.

Guston's work remained an intensely personal statement throughout its many transformations, often relying on his private iconography of images to convey ideas about the human condition and to express the artist's own fears and crises. As he wrote in 1974, his late paintings depict a "sort of Dante Inferno land." The unsettling color scheme of "The Street"—red, bright pink, and gunmetal gray—and its crude style of painting add to the sense of urgent turmoil and despair.

Andrea S. Van Dyke. Art In Our Time. Exh. cat., Milwaukee Art Museum. Milwaukee, 1980, unpaginated, ill. (color), states that this painting contains many of Guston's familiar images such as the chunky shoe, spiders and bottles; identifies the tangled leg imagery from paintings done in 1976; states that the piece of wood stuck with nails "represents an artist's easel and is always included in the works that show the artist either working on or contemplating his art"; comments that Guston's works are always at least in part autobiographical, noting that here the artist's tools are found among the trash.

Lisa M. Messinger in "Twentieth Century Art." The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Notable Acquisitions, 1983–1984. New York, 1984, p. 98, ill. (color), states that this painting "summarizes several raw and visceral themes that characterize Philip Guston's return in the 1970s to figurative subject matter after having been for many years one of the most lyrical of the first–generation Abstract Expressionists".